What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
One of the things I've always loved about queer culture is the openness and passionate curiosity about love, desire and the myriad forms of affectionate ties.
Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).
As a gay man, I think the role of culture is central to how you change politics - culture is politics.
Man, if you're gay we can be friends. If you're straight, we can be friends. I'm not gay, I don't plan on being gay, I don't condone it and I'm not sayin' I'm against it.
Gay culture is in a coming-out process of its own. From out of the closets in the '60s, the culture moved onto the disco floors of the '70s and through the hospital wards of the '80s and onwards to the streets.
A gay man can be friends with a straight man. That can happen.
Gay culture is surviving and thriving. Some activists believe the recent rise in homophobic violence might be a gauge of the success of positive gay images.
Culture is the intersection of people and life itself. It's how we deal with life, love, death, birth, disappointment... all of that is expressed in culture.
Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.
A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex.